Usability

Bulk conversion of webp files to png format

Google has come up with a nice new image format called webp. Currently support for this format is fairly limited, so if you need to use webp images else where it might be nice to convert them to a more widely supported format. To do the conversion, Google has made a small tool available called dwebp. The tool however does only seem to support conversion of a single image, not a batch of images.

Google Docs: So, you can rename documents...

A while back I complained you couldn’t change title on documents in Google Docs. Well, you can. It just wasn’t obvious to me how you do it. Just click on the title while the document is open, and you can change it.

Footers - not just the end of the page

On most websites - including this one - the footer is the boring place where you (usually) place all the pocket lint, which didn’t make it into the page anywhere else. It usually have a copyright notice, links to a site map and other stuff which may be important, but not interesting (speaking in very broad terms). Today I came across an article on footers with great usability. Footer Usability? Yes, and from a blunt disregard and ignorance, I’ve discovered that the site footer is an excellent place to place a lot more effort.

Top 3 developer vanities (or oversights)

Sometimes web developers forget, that they are not typical net users and develop websites and applications for themselves rather than the intended mainstream users. Too often we let ourselves slip into a “geek to geek world”, and forget, that many of the sites we create are not for geeks, but for common users. Here are the top three mistakes made across a large number of mainstream websites, as I’ve seen them.

Access denied

I was browsing across some pages at Telia Mobile – one of the largest mobile providers in Denmark (and Scandinavia) and frankly, their webshop leaves something to be desired in terms o user-friendly behaviour. I can to some extend accept to be rejected if there are reasonable reasons behind it, but this rejection – that’s just too much and too amaturish in 2005: LOST IMAGE First the Internet Explorer doesn’t ship with OSX any more – Safari does and shouold be supported, if you intend to support Mac-users.